All night, the blank page.
All night, the unopened book beat its black wings against the glass,
and I woke, forgetful.

Just like in the movies, the girl is there then gone,
each frame suspended midair.
This moment, wherever it finds us, is neither

mine nor yours.
A place with no
single word rises around

us with the bare
suddenness of a house,
wherein one finds

an unstained coffee mug, a cigarette burned to ash.
An iris rots in a vase above the fireplace.
Which I mattered, which earned its belonging?

The nerves, their gracless hum, now quieted.
At times the window and everything in it is blue.
The wish to damage and deny is its own season.

Unless an omen overwhelms the willow,
the pond is dried up and gone and every
proposition forgets the one before it. The camphor field

between grapes and echoes, blazes until its darkening.
Nothing candles the heart so
much as loss.

Names tell me names to trace
the ways back

towards the saying of some
delicate,
             some infinitely stuttering thing.

 

Copyright © Richard Deming, 2007.

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Richard Deming is a poet and critic whose poems have appeared in Field, Sulfur, Colorado Review, Indiana Review, Mandorla, Kiosk, and other magazines, as well as in the anthology Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, edited by David Lehman. He is the author of Somewhere Hereabouts (Potes and Poets Press). Currently he lectures in the English Department at Yale University.